I’m jumping around, not reading this book in order. The following excerpt resonated with my experience in the past couple of years of seeing people or having people say to me things that reflect a certain sense of “traditional” or “normal sensibilities”. Sensibilities in general inform how we view human nature and social relationships, as well as how to respond to other sensibilities.
The responses that stand out to me pretty vividly are along the lines of, “Nah, I don’t believe in that hippie crap.” And here I am thinking I’d become quite conservative. I can accept that I, as an aikido practitioner and mental health student, give more thought than the average person to certain details, particularly pertaining to context. And such level of detail is overwhelming to most people and therefore something that they are inclined to dismiss, not just rationally but emotionally/compulsively.
However it is more and more obvious to me that at every moment human beings are always swimming through a staggering number of factors, and that just because we perceive only some and attribute importance to only some of those, it is illusory that we see and have a handle on the factors that count.
We must reconsider the pat assumption that we are immune to toxic social encounters. Save for the passing stormy mood, we often suppose, our interactions matter little to us at any biological level. But this turns out to be a comforting illusion. Just as we catch a virus from someone else, we may also “catch” an emotional funk that makes us more vulnerable to that same virus or otherwise undermines our well-being.
In this sense, social responsibility begins here and now, when we act in ways that help create optimal states in others, from those we encounter casually to those we love and care about most dearly.
… the crucial challenge for this century will be to expand the circle of those we count among Us, and shrink the numbers we count as Them.
And so this passage resonated with my belief that aikido has the potential to be a vehicle for people to cultivate themselves in a way that more peace is realized in the world.
